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COMMENT
WHAT NOW, ENGINEER?
Hoeing
says that
the 777
could he in
production for 50
years."
The unveiling of the Boeing 777 was the signal of a huge engineering triumph — but it might also have marked the apogee of development
of conventional large commercial airliners.
While the aircraft themselves seem to get
ever bigger, the numbers of them under
development get ever smaller and the dis
tance by which each new design can move
the boundaries of technical feasibility be
comes smaller still.
Part of that arises from the increasing
capability of the designers to extract more
from simpler aircraft. The Boeing 737 is now
being developed into
an aircraft almost as
large and as capable as
the 757. The 777 has
started life as a re
placement for the first-
generation widebodies
such as the Lockheed
L-1011 and the
McDonnell Douglas
DC-IO, but already its
manufacturer is talking
about stretched ver
sions which could/will
replace the first-generation 747S.
At the same time, aircraft manufacturers
are looking to far longer production runs of
their aircraft: Boeing says that the 777 could
be in production for 50 years. Already, the
737 has been in production for 26 years, the
747 for 25. The McDonnell Douglas DC-9,
of which today's MD-80 and -90 series are
still officially derivatives, first went into
service in 1965.
The design of the 777 has involved an
unprecedented amount of resource: past
designs may have called for greater numbers
of man-hours, but none has called for a
greater number of calculations.
Many of those calculations were made in
establishing parameters which have never
been the subject of absolute calculation
before. In the past, problems or limitations
in the design might not have been discov
ered until the aircraft was being assembled
or (more ominously) was in service.
This time round, the 777's flight-control
system has already "flown" many hundreds
of hours, during which limits which would
never be explored in actual service have
already been addressed. Parts were "assem
bled" on screen and interferences resolved
long before metal was cut.
All of these advances have required a huge
input of resource. The question is: what
does that resource do now? If the applica
tion of that resource has been as successful
as Boeing suggests, there will be fewer
redesigns and post-first-flight development
of its new aircraft than there have ever been
before. Theoretically, there should be none,
and therefore there should be little work for
design and development engineers to do.
Boeing says that the 777 is the last
completely new airframe it will build this
century. It has already decided that the
successor to its enormously successful 737
will be another 737: stretched and re-
winged, maybe, but still a 737. All the
indications are that the immediate 747
successor will be another, larger, 747, and
that the much-dis
cussed 800-1,000-
seater is a much more
distant, much more
tentative project.
Much the same cir
cumstance holds at
Airbus Industrie,
which, in a relatively
short time, has estab
lished itself as a com
petitor in all major
airliner-market sec
tors, except that for
400-seaters. Its oldest designs (the A300/310
family) are younger than those of the Boeing
737 and 747, and of the McDonnell Douglas
MD-80/90 and MD-11.
In short, the industry as exemplified by
Boeing, refined and developed its design and
development capabilities to awesome, proba
bly unparallelled, levels and is running out
of things to develop with them. Yes, there
is the promise of a future supersonic trans
port, which is the subject of both joint
US/European and independent preliminary
studies. That, however, is a long way off
and, while a new supersonic transport is
likely to be the most complex civil-airliner
project ever tackled, its development will
not require the full combined resources of
Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Airbus and
its constituent partners.
Obviously, there are many derivatives still
to come of these major existing designs —
Boeing speaks of the initial range of 777
variants not being complete for up to eight
years, for instance. With the basic design
existing in digital form, the development of
even a major derivative will probably be
easier in the future than it has ever been.
Boeing president Phil Condit spoke at the
777 unveiling of the company's need to
stabilise its workforce. Its very success in
mastering the art of aircraft development as
far as it has could make that task far more
tricky than market swings ever have. •
FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 20 - 26 April, 1994